Long and deadly wearisome was the journey to Ballarat. Necessarily slow, it became insufferably tedious to impatient men who had been used to take counsel but of their own will and caprice. An early start, a late ending to the dragging day's journey, broken but by a short mid-day halt. Such was the order of Lance's return to Ballarat, until, on the fifth day, they saw once more in the distance the smoke of the thousand camp fires and heard the distant surge-like murmur of the army of the Mine. Wearied and heart-sick, melancholy and furious by turns, Lance Trevanion almost commenced to doubt of his own identity. When they arrived at the camp he found himself led forward between two troopers and half conducted, half pushed into a cell, the clang of the bolt seeming to intensify the strange unreality of his position. The trooper informed him that his meal would be sent in directly; that he would have to make the best of it with the blankets doubled up for a bed in a corner of the cell until next day. Then he would be brought before the police magistrate, and either discharged or committed, as the case might be. On the journey Lance had, after his first paroxysm of rage and disgust, abundant leisure to think over and over the facts and probable consequences of his position. He was apparently to be arraigned, if committed for trial, for having in his possession a stolen horse. But could they, could any one prove that he had 'guilty knowledge--that he knew of its being dishonestly come by'? Were not half the horses then sold in Ballarat supposed to be stolen, stolen from the 'Sydney side,' from South Australia, from all parts of Victoria indeed? He had never known any one tried on such a charge, and had, indeed, thought in his ignorance that laxity about the ownership of live stock was one of the customs of the country, rendered indeed almost inevitable from the absence of fencing or natural boundaries between the immense herds and flocks. He had not, of course, the smallest suspicion that Pendragon, the horse he had so named in memory of the old Cornish legend, which he had bought from Ned Lawless at a high figure, was other than perfectly 'square,' as Ned would have phrased it. Had he known the truth he would have repudiated the purchase with scorn. But now, to be arrested and marched to gaol with as much formality as if he had taken a horse out of the stable of a neighbouring proprietor in Cornwall, or 'lifted' a flock of black-faced sheep, struck him as truly anomalous and absurd. Next morning, after a night which came to an end in spite of his forlorn condition, he found himself making one of a large class of _détenues_ who, for one offence or another, were to come up for judgment.